“The brutal truth is that, whether you look at early childhood education access to [education], whether you look at math and science scores K-12, whether you look at college completion rates, we’re top 10 in nothing,” Duncan said on Yahoo Finance's Midday Movers.

“And that’s not good enough.”

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Duncan was one of the nation's longest-serving Education secretaries, serving from 2009-2015.

A 2017 Pew Research Center survey found U.S. students lag behind their peers in other developed nations in terms of math, reading and science. Using the most recent results of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), a cross-national test that assesses skills among global 15-year-olds, the U.S. ranked 38 out of the 71 countries in math and 24th in science, Pew found.